I’ve loaded the R1CBU UI on the X6100. Reading the manual exposes all sorts of great features and conveniences:

Highlights

• Large waterfall
• Lots of options on MFK and VOL knobs, and it’s customizable
• SWR scan is very fast
• CW decoder is robust
• ALC starts at 0.0
• Serial console access: minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0, root, 123

Bugs

• Setting time down to the second is weird. I used serial console and CLI instead.

I found the QRZ awards tab on the logbook, and applied for awards for which I’ve qualified. They now show on my profile.

I installed a new firmware, egzumer, on my Quansheng UV-K5. The firmware has some handy features:

• It displays name and frequency at once
• It leaves the backlight on all the time at a lower level

Here’s a good demo of what ALC is doing. It’s clipping off the top of the signal, so turn the power up to just before ALC reacts, whether it’s 0->100 like the radio in the video or 100->0 like Xiegu radios.

I checked into the Welfare Net at 7:45pm ET. KC3MBB, Brett, just up the street at Donnerville and Stony Battery Rd contacted me afterward to welcome me.

Tuned to 8416khz, I received a Navtex weather report. I tuned the X6100, CW, FIL2 set to be really narrow, and I let fldigi decode the transmission as Navtex.

I have a dipole that’s 20m long (10m each side) strung through the house right to the banana plug adapter to the radio and no coax. I’ve coiled the wires together at the feed point to shorten and tune. I can run 40m with tuner turned off. I’m hitting Europe, Central America, Canada, and the midwest US.

I figure, since the wires are insulated and kept parallel to each other, the coil is serving as feed line and not part of the antenna.

I pass off to KC3SCY, Luke, or AF3Z, Jim.

We discussed baluns:

• 4:1 balun
• 1:1 balun will let a dipole tune wider on any band
• 9:1 <-> 1:9 can transform for long runs of transmission cable

Running the 41-foot (12.5m) random wire, it works great for 10m and 20m. It tunes really quickly. The power supply gives lots of buzzing and noise on these bands. ATT tames the power supply noise pretty well.

Antenna of the day: 12.5m random wire w/ 9:1 unun strung from high in loft to the outside laundry line. It tunes for 10m, 12m, 15m, and 20m nicely, but not for 40m. I switched to 5m dipole twist for 40m.